Two Poems About Boys Eating Cigarettes

Karen J. Weyant’s poem, “The Boy Who Ate Cigarettes,” from her chapbook, Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt, reminded me of one of my own.

The Boy Who Ate Cigarettes

Some said he lived under the Mill Street Bridge,
burning cancelled checks and lotto tickets
to keep warm. Other said he stayed
behind the town’s tattoo parlor, pushing
old syringes up the banisters, just to hear
the noise they made when they rolled back down.
When we were kids, we only saw his reflection,
a corner of his smile in the deli’s dirty windows,
a chin in the potholes that cradled spring thaw.
With every glimpse of black teeth, singed lips
flipped cigarettes, he spit white ashes and soot.
The grownups blamed him for those mornings
when the fog never lifted, when the yellow haze
made us cough, hid the sharp edges of street corners
and stop signs. I saw him, finally, when I was 13.
Crouched on the pipe fence near the pool hall,
he blew smoke rings my way, reached out
to touch my hair. He caught a strand, tugged.
Donora, he whispered, as if murmuring
a lover’s name, as if I was someone he knew.

–By Karen J. Weyant

She teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. Her chapbook won the 2011 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest. Here’s synchronicity:

A Natural History of Cigarette Butts
Devil’s Notch, Catskills

Deep in prickly briar wands unclawing leaves
for May lies an open pack of Parliaments,
revealing nibbled foil, cigarettes tightly packed
yet trimmed of every filter. Did a mouse
harvest cotton for its nest? If so, may we
call this hope? My mother smoked,

smoked and had a throat scar like a nipple.
As a child to shame her into quitting, I ate
her Parliaments in front of guests and choked
on filters. I coughed with terrifying dryness,
until a man bent me on his knees and pounded
on my back. She thought I was dying.

One by one I pick them from roadside gravel
or straw-like gully grass woven down by runoff:
cotton filters wrapped white or caramel.
All morning I’ve collected trash in this notch,
where larger garbage should fill my yellow bag.
My mother quit but I can’t seem to stop.

–By Will Nixon

The Catskill 3500 Club has taken responsibility for litter pickup on the county highway through Devils Notch. One day, alas, I was the only member to show up for the task. Happily, I came home with this poem.

This entry was posted in Poems and tagged , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.